Documentary lifts the lid on Russian doping

The headline quote from whistleblower and former Russian discus thrower Yevgeniya Pecherina, was that: "Most [Russian] athletes dope, around 99 per cent. And you get everything. The least detectable the drug, the more expensive it is."

The documentary alleged that Russian officials supplied banned substances in exchange for 5 per cent of athletes' incomes and worked with doping control authorities to keep the lid on positive tests.

The information came largely from former Russian anti-doping agency (RUSADA) official Vitaly Stepanov and his wife Yulia, a former 800m runner who was banned for doping.

The IAAF announced an independent commission led by former WADA chief Dick Pound to look into the allegations.

On the basis of the data, experts spoken to for the documentary concluded that one third of medals won at the Olympics between 2001 and 2012 - ie. from the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games to London in 2012 - were a result of doping.

WADA then declared RUSADA non-compliant with the world anti-doping code. Russian officials responded by vowing co-operation with oversight from inspectors and agreeing to make changes to the system.

Early in 2016, three IAAF officials - including former Russian Athletics Federation (ARAF) president Valentin Balakhnichev and senior Russian athletics coach Alexei Melnikov - were banned for life by the IAAF's ethics committee for blackmailing athletes and concealing positive drug tests.

Bombshell report finds testers thwarted by Russians

But things got worse by the middle of the month, when days before a final decision by the IAAF on whether to allow Russia's athletics participation in Rio, WADA released a bombshell pre-Olympic report.

But another blow to Russia's reputation came in May when Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of Moscow's WADA-accredited anti-doping laboratory, who had fled to the West amid the scandals, did a series of interviews with international media alleging that he had come up with a "three-drug cocktail" with which he had doped dozens of athletes, including up to 15 medallists at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.

Rodchenkov painted a picture of a tightly organised campaign of state-sponsored doping, with the drug lab working in concert with Russian security forces to subvert the integrity of the Games.

He alleged forces helped him pry open and reseal 'tamper-proof' sample containers, then removing samples from the laboratory through a concealed hole in the wall.

Russia had a huge medal haul at Sochi, winning 13 gold, 11 silver and nine bronze compared to a total of 15 medals - just three of them gold - at Vancouver four years earlier.

McLaren report the final straw?

Russian officials furiously denied the claims, but it led to another investigation, conducted by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren.

The report, when handed down in Toronto, not only backed the allegations, but suggested that cheating went beyond Sochi, affecting a series of World Championships in different sports held in Russia.

"The Moscow Laboratory operated, for the protection of doped Russian athletes, within a State-dictated failsafe system, described in the report as the Disappearing Positive Methodology," McLaren stated in his key findings.

Overall, a graph in the report listed at least 28 Olympic sports - both Summer and Winter Olympics and Paralympic sports - where there had been "disappearing positive test results by Russian athletes".

Condemnation was swift, and totally unsurprising, since a draft copy of a letter to the IOC from USADA chief Travis Tygart and his Canadian counterpart - reportedly backed by several National Olympic Committees - calling for a ban on all Russian athletes had been leaked to the media ahead of the report's publication.

The IOC president Thomas Bach's responded to the behaviour in the report as a "shocking and unprecedented attack" on the integrity of sport and the Olympic Games.